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The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility: A Study in the Background of Vatican I. By RICHARD F. COSTIGAN, SJ.

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jts/flm059

1477-4607

Norman Tanner,

Catholicism and Religious Studies

This learned volume studies the works of nine men who wrote on papal infallibility in the two centuries between the Gallican Articles of 1682 and the first Vatican council of 1869–70. The focus is precise, upon two issues in their writings, namely, whether and in what sense papal teaching may be described as infallible, and the related issue, whether some wider consensus in the Church, principally that of the episcopate, is a necessary condition for this infallibility. The book appears somewhat like two teams batting against each other. On the one side were five Frenchmen, all of them uneasy with the concept of papal infallibility, especially if the papacy was taken in isolation from the rest of the episcopate: Bishops Bossuet (1627–1704) and La Luzerne (1738–1821) and the priests Honoré Tournely (1658–1729), Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier (1718–90), and Louis Bailly (1730–1808). On the other side were four Italians, priests, who supported papal infallibility and, in varying degrees, that of a pope almost in isolation from the rest of the episcopate and the wider Church: Giuseppe-Agostino Orsi (1692–1761), a Dominican friar who was made a cardinal in 1759, Pietro Ballerini (1698–1769), Alfonso Muzzarelli (1749–1813), and the Jesuit Giovanni Perrone (1794–1876). The nine men are carefully chosen. All of them were prolific and well-known authors, certainly among the most important writers on papal authority in France and Italy during the two centuries in question. Similar debates occurred in other countries of western Europe, yet France and Italy were right at the centre of the controversy. Costigan's study, therefore, makes a major contribution to our understanding of the background of Vatican I. The format is of one chapter dedicated to each person, or to two individuals in the case of Bergier and Bailly: these portraits, which follow in chronological order, are set within the framework of a full introduction and conclusion. The advantage of the approach is that the reader is able to focus on the writer in question in a single-minded way, without distraction. Three of the chapters—those on Bossuet, Tournely, and Ballerini—have already appeared in Theological Studies. The others are new, though the bibliography reveals half a dozen previous articles by Costigan on related topics. The book represents the mature thoughts of a distinguished scholar.